Practice Materials

Coaches/parents/students always ask for advice on how to be prepared for the contest.....

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The Rich Morrow Math Challenge is just like any other math contest: it will be filled with problems that are tricky and challenging, and cause the students to think. Calculators are allowed (any type of traditional calculator, though not phones or tablets), but the calculator will not ever just give the students answers (they'll have to think about what operations to do). Like most contests, there is a time constraint: for each round, the students are given 30 minutes.

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Here is a HUGE packet (111 pages) of practice material (mostly Team Rounds and such for coaches to use at practices): Practice Material

Also, here is a document full of helpful links that I've shared at coaches meetings: Great links

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The Rounds are:

  • Individual Round (between 25 and 30 multiple choice problems)

  • Team Round (between 10 and 15 questions, done in grade-level teams)

  • Relay Round (15 questions, though each grade-level team works on a different part, and the "final answer" for each question is a combination of the three parts, which must be "relayed" from team to team.

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Practices:

  • Each school does practices their own way. Some just invite the 3 kids for each grade, and some invite more. I recommend that, if possible, coaches involve MORE than just their nine students, just so that more students can benefit from the practice experience. We'll need the registration for the chosen 9 students by Nov 1st.

  • At practices, you want to give the kids problems that are tricky and challenging, like the ones they'll see on the contest. The "Great links" document above has lots of ideas for places to find these problems. Obviously the kids will need to know "the basics" as well, but the contest is not exactly tied to the state or national standards.

  • Whenever possible, I encourage coaches to play games that are fun to get the kids working quickly AND having fun. Here are some ideas:

    • Use whiteboards and have kids hold up answers quickly.

    • "Guts" rounds are a part of the Harvard/MIT math contest. Teams work on short problem sets. Whenever they want to, they hand it in and start the next set. It's called "guts," because "guts" are what it takes to hand in a problem set, even if you're not 100% sure every answer is correct. I usually just take a long contest and use a big paper-cutter to chop into pieces.

    • Do "stations" with one hard problem at each station.

    • Do an online contest (Kahoot, Blooket, Quizizz, GimKit, etc.)

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Choosing your team:

  • There is no "one right way" to choose your team. You can have NEW kids every year, so more kids get to experience it. Or the SAME kids each year (so that the kids get better each year). You can use a contest (or a bunch of contests) to choose your kids. Or do it randomly. Or use a combination of "math performance" and "teamwork rating" (since 2/3 of the contest is done in teams). I've heard of schools doing it ALL these ways, and most schools seem to tweak their method every few years.